Friday, June 8, 2012

the art of the frame

I'm SO excited. Next week, I get to pick this up from the framer's and I cannot wait to see how my choices of mat and frame are going to look. What mat colors and frame style would you have chosen?

I bought this in late February, at the 28th Annual Mar*n Art of the Amer*ca's Show, which is just an amazing gathering of ethnographic art dealers and contemporary American Indian artists: photographers, jewelers, potters, painters, weavers. When HL, CD (Graphics Girl) and I were making our plans to go, I was committed to buying a piece of ledger art by Michael H*orse. I've admired his work for more than a decade and have been smacking myself that I was too poor or cheap (poor the first time, cheap the second) to buy one of his paintings on old boarding school newspapers like The Red M*n (Carlisle Indian Industrial School). The first time I saw one of these was in the gift shop of the Heard Museum, when they were hosting a boarding school exhibit and we just happened to catch it on our way back from a conference in Flagstaff. I think the painting was $700, which now seems like a pittance. Last year, at the Mar*in Show, they were considerably more, but I just couldn't rationalize spending the $. But this year, I was committed to the purchase. Of course, he had exactly zero (!) paintings on boarding school newspapers with him. Gah! And I wasn't taken by any of the other options he'd brought to the show. BUT, around the corner was Terrance Gu*ardipee's booth. I had admired the vivid colors in his work last year (but again, saw it as way too pricey for my pocketbook--in part because his renderings are on a much larger scale than the tabloid-sized works of Horse). Gu*ardipee is Blackfeet and uses maps of Montana (ancestral territory), along with related archival ephemera, as the background for his work. The three of us combed through his offerings, while he explained the imagery and meanings (I tried not to take FOREVER, since I had insisted we visit the contemporary art side of the event prior to the ethnographic--which they were really there to see). In the end, I chose this piece because it I loved the colors and the fact that it was a woman warrior (which sort of relates to the rationale for my purchase--more on that next week). Her name is "Running Eagle." Stay tuned for the final framed version. I'll try to take a better photo for that (in part because I told Guar*dipee I'd email him an image of the finished product). Did I say that MGC is super jealous? Yes, he is. Yeah for me, because he has THE best collection of contemporary American Indian art of any of my friends.

Ready early! Just got the call. And yes, I was going to go with the black on black (like the example he had exhibited). But I changed my mind over the course of the waiting 3 months to frame it. Stay tuned.